41 ms·

UX is not UI

62 points by davepoon 13y ago

everettForth 13y ago
relevant: http://design.org/blog/difference-between-ux-and-ui-subtleties-explained-cereal http://design.org/blog/difference-between-ux-and-ui-subtleti...
weixiyen 13y ago
Out of curiosity, how many people did not know that.
- rhizome31 13y ago
  At least a few :) Here is my anecdote. One of my friends got an offer from his company to evolve his current position into a UX position. A while later, they have an actual project on which he could work as a UX designer. The only thing they ask is how fluent he is with a specific image editing software.
  - ams6110 13y ago
    Heh... like qualifying a programmer by how fluent he is with Visual Studio.
- martin-adams 13y ago
  I joined a large company as a UI developer and got sent on a UX course due to this misconception. A happy accident I guess as it worked out the best for everyone.
- eflowers 13y ago
  I would say 95% of initial impression I've had is that I'm a "look and feel" person. Even after long, very specific conversations, it still comes out as "look and feel." And honestly, that's what most people care about since they can see it. As long as that doesn't impeded the work that goes behind it, I don't think that will change. You just need your boss, and bosses boss, and maybe an executive to understand what you're doing so you don't just look like a wasted headcount that should be doing JUST look and feel, but isn't.
Sarien 13y ago
So basically he is saying that some parts that have been traditionally considered a part of UI design are not a part of UI design but of UX and that is why UX and UI are different. "Boohoo, nobody takes me seriously, they all think I just make pretty dialogs." I know that feeling but I don't think coming up with more names and vague definitions that nobody knows is going to help.
- maaaats 13y ago
  Taking an entire article and expressing it as "boohoo" is not a good way to have a meaningful discussion.
  - TheZenPsycho 13y ago
    neither is writing an entire article that has a lot of words, and yet says nothing.
- seivan 13y ago
  Performance and Speed is UX. Something UI designers never really will understand. It's not just UX, but the only UX that's actually quite objective. No one ever goes "Oh gosh this app is too fast" Another non developer talking about things that they can't implement.
  - TheZenPsycho 13y ago
    Condescension is not a very good technique for persuasion.
  - eflowers 13y ago
    I agree. That's one of those places where being in a UX role is way outside of UI design, and I'm taking the apps on-site with customers (I am mostly b2b) and observing and testing them as they use it. Recording their responses, as well as the applications. When logging in to the system takes 40 seconds because of database performance (or lack of), that's a UX insight that needs to be observed and reported. That's not something I can control but it has a huge impact on the user's experience. There's an element of user-advocacy that I'm doing where I take the experience they are having and translate it back into business, design, and development goals as when someone is trying to use an enterprise piece of software and the experience is terrible, that is going to fall on designers, developers, PM's, and all the other people involved in the creation of the "thing" which becomes the user's experience. That's another ambiguous situation. I go spend 2 days with users out at a company HQ, and I come back with tons of data that now has to be consumed by devs, designers, pm, marketers, executives, QA, customer service etc etc. The experience of what we build is a collection of every role in the entire company as far as the user is concerned, and all those various business roles need that UX information brought back. So at this point I'm so far from UI and visual design I'm closer to a PM or product owner now, but soon will be jumping back into the design an development realm to start to fix those experience problems.. unless the problems result in bad business drivers or invalid use-cases, so then I'm back at the PM and management table, I still can't find a clear distinction about what I'm supposed to say I do. I just know that there is a certain disservice to just tell people "UI design, look and feel."
itsbits 13y ago
well written article..
whizzkid 13y ago
To the people who consider UX as a job title. If you want your online business to be successful, UX is the first thing you should think of. Design is like the strawberries on the cake, UX is, how the cake tastes.
- tlarkworthy 13y ago
  I have another set of people, the product designers, who will strongly disagree on your unqualified use of word "design", saying that design is the all encompassing use of a "thing" in a context. Largely being what you call UX. My larger point is that the geeks of the web, in trying to come up with pointlessly precise definitions of what they do, rebase themselves from where they came from.
  - whizzkid 13y ago
    I totally agree with "trying to come up with pointlessly precise definitions of what they do" what i am trying to say is, what makes product successful is not the interface design. I don't care if your product looks so beautiful and lovely if i can not use it with bad bandwidth for example, or on my mobile. I don't care how cool colours you use, if i need to click everywhere to find what i am looking for.
    - rimantas 13y ago
      > "trying to come up with pointlessly precise definitions of what they do" A few years ago I was following a few IA (Information Architecture) blogs, but dropped them quite quickly, because that was pretty much the main concern of theirs :)
- jalfresi 13y ago
  For me, when some people say "design" they mean "style". For example, someone works in the UI layer? That's the visual style of the application. I think in the early days of the web, "design" was co-opted from traditional print graphic designers as a way to draw a distinction from then; a web designer. However, I think its much more important to emphasize the capital D Design that occurs in software development, as in your cake example. So I would adjust your example as such: "visual style is like the strawberries on the cake, Design is the recipe. UX is how the cake tastes i.e. the culmination of Design and attention to detail during the assembly process"
ryanbrunner 13y ago
I get that UX is not UI. I really do. The one thing that consistently confuses me is that when someone explains what UX is, it always ends up being explained in a very nebulous way where a UX designer seems to have authority over virtually everything in a company, and responsibility over very little. It can occasionally feel as though UX people want to be PMs, UI designers, marketers, developers, and data analysts all at the same time, but of course when pressed, they "aren't supposed to be about UI / PM / dev / etc.". The list is a great example. "Company Culture evangelism" is a UX discipline? Really?
- martin-adams 13y ago
  No, they want to work with the PMs, UI designers, marketers, developers, and data analysts, enabling them to have the right tools to make better choices.
  - untog 13y ago
    But "work with" as a very euphemistic term. Are they instructing the PMs etc., or are they acting on their orders? I know that in an ideal world it's 50/50, but I don't think a position that is involved in every single step of the project has any chance of success unless you happen to also be in charge.
    - derefr 13y ago
      > Are they instructing the PMs etc., or are they acting on their orders? What does a consultant do? A UX designer is basically another name for a consultant who, by training, knows a lot of stuff about the experience your users will have with your product. Like with any consultant, the relationship can be anywhere from asking them direct questions, to getting them to make you mock-ups, to modifying your product, to having them tell you what to do. As with any other consultant, you hire them for their perspective and experience, not for some particular skill. A UX guy is not necessarily good at creating pretty designs--although he'll be able to tell you, using user-testing et al, whether a design is pretty. And so forth, for each thing they do. It's not a collection of skills; it's an approach. (A similar question might be "what does it mean to hire a scientist?" Not skills; approach.)
joshcrowder 13y ago
Great Article. UX is the new buzzword in pretty much every sector at the moment, especially financial, my last contract was "UX Developer" I'm not even sure what it means, but from my day to day, I wrote javascript HA!
- davepoon 13y ago
  Heheh, so they intended to hire a front end developer, because of the new buzzword, and then they hired as a UX Developer to chase up the trend... I have seen a lot of companies doing that, they also guess a UX designer could do everything...
- mcv 13y ago
  I guess I should also keep an eye on UX gigs then. I'm a programmer and tended to ignore UX positions because I figured it might be a whole separate discipline. But I can do javascript just fine. (I'm not much good at graphical design, though.)
lttlrck 13y ago
Who doesn't understand the difference between Interface and Experience? Clearly using tools with virtually no interface at all can be a great experience.
- johnward 13y ago
  Also UI can be a huge part of UX.
  - crayola 13y ago
    CLI is an interface too, though.
    - GeneralMayhem 13y ago
      Yes, and it's a UI. GUI is a strict subset of UI, as is CLI.
- eflowers 13y ago
  Outside of places like HN, most people don't. I am trying to think of a hacker analogy, but can't.
TheZenPsycho 13y ago
So let's take all this stuff that a UI designer does, claim that a UI designer doesn't do them and can't possibly understand them, and invent a new term, UX, to mean the thing that UI design used to mean. Okay.
- derefr 13y ago
  Well, no. All those people who were already doing those things are UX designers now. I think the point of the rename is mostly that "UI designer" is limited and derogatory in the perception it encourages, like "code monkey" or "web designer." Nobody just does UI, so nobody is, or was ever, just a UI designer.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    UI designer is not really a job title. Visual and interaction designers are common titles, UX designer is used in orgs who don't want to distinguish officially, though designers usually have strength in one area over the other. At least that is the way it seems to work at big companies. I'm sure smaller companies use whatever the manager thinks of.
  - TheZenPsycho 13y ago
    That reminds me of the universities that I went to that tried to rename the Graphic Design departments to "Communication Design" or "Graphic Communications" or anything but the image of a lowly pixel pusher. Graphic Design has been greatly devalued by the prevalence of the adobe suite of software- it used to be about solving large organisational problems. now people just think "The way it looks" and that perception has become impossible to shake. It's a real problem. I don't think it's solved by coming up with new airy fairy words that nobody understands, and are never clearly defined. It gives the strong impression that it's not a real job. Like "social media consultant".
jamesdelaneyie 13y ago
Cool, so UX is just good old fashioned design.
jol 13y ago
Since when UI ( =User Interface) is only visual? To me it seems as UI got too narrow understanding of just visual in the wild (i.e. general population) and then people who really understand what they are doing decided to rebrand themselves as too many people saying they are related to UI where just visual design related...
madoublet 13y ago
Yes and no, IMHO. The list on the left are all tools to solve interaction problems. But, I think "UX" professionals tend to fall into the trap that this is a process needed for every problem. Sometimes, good UX is just UI/Visual design. And, that is just fine.
eflowers 13y ago
Hello, I wrote this article. I can check one thing off my bucket list - an article of mine on the front page of HN (spot 28 as I write this). Reading the stuff here in HN, I agree with almost everything said. My intent wasn't to take a hard line tone, and in retrospect after getting tons and tons of feedback, I'd write it differently, but I'll take this chance to clarify some things, both for myself and for others. It is not written in a snarky or superior voice. It wasn't a rant. If it sounded so, I apologize. It also comes off as a list of "this is what a UX job title should be", which also wasn't my intent. The simplest way to say what I was trying to convey is that if you label yourself as anything "UX whatever", it is perceived as "graphic artist for interfaces." The article often seems to convey that UX "owns" all these different things, like it's a panacea role above all others. It's not. It's not something that I can clearly define. On the little 2-column lists, the things on the left were supposed to be things that I/we "do" in the sense of what often becomes the reality of the job, not in the sense of responsibilities that should be granted to use to be accountable for. And if that large list does become the reality of the job, it's more than anyone can or should do. It was intended to be a "these are some of the things a UX person might be responsible for." And yes there are some silly ones on there. I don't think UX is in a position of being a land-grab of everything that isn't writing code because "it's what we do", but it's more of a "this is what we are often doing" list. And some of the things on it should be owned by other discrete jobs careers. The motivation to write the article came from being in role after role where that list on the left was the list of things I was inadvertently responsible for, but "graphic designer for interfaces" is all that is seen by others, which isn't fair to UX people who don't focus on interface design, and isn't fair to interface designers who don't focus on the UX work that isn't based on UI or visuals or interaction. It's sort of just a response to the introductory conversation I have the first few weeks at any job. "What is your role here?" "Well I'm the new UX guy." "Great! Our stuff is ugly, you're gonna give it that sexy look and feel?" "Yes, but I am going to be doing other things that sort of result in that look and feel you want" And then when I list off some of those things, typically the other person looks at me like I'm a lunatic and we both end up confused on what I'm actually supposed to be doing, and the disappointment that I'm not just there for look and feel. But for sure, the article is not meant to be a land-grab or king of the hill situation of "UX OWNS EVERYTHING", but just a glimpse into the terrible ambiguity of what UX is and how the very common initial perception of "graphic designer for interfaces" makes it even more unclear.

62 points by davepoon 13y ago

relevant: http://design.org/blog/difference-between-ux-and-ui-subtleties-explained-cereal http://design.org/blog/difference-between-ux-and-ui-subtleti...

weixiyen 13y ago

Out of curiosity, how many people did not know that.

rhizome31 13y ago
At least a few :) Here is my anecdote. One of my friends got an offer from his company to evolve his current position into a UX position. A while later, they have an actual project on which he could work as a UX designer. The only thing they ask is how fluent he is with a specific image editing software.
- ams6110 13y ago
  Heh... like qualifying a programmer by how fluent he is with Visual Studio.
martin-adams 13y ago
I joined a large company as a UI developer and got sent on a UX course due to this misconception. A happy accident I guess as it worked out the best for everyone.
eflowers 13y ago
I would say 95% of initial impression I've had is that I'm a "look and feel" person. Even after long, very specific conversations, it still comes out as "look and feel." And honestly, that's what most people care about since they can see it. As long as that doesn't impeded the work that goes behind it, I don't think that will change. You just need your boss, and bosses boss, and maybe an executive to understand what you're doing so you don't just look like a wasted headcount that should be doing JUST look and feel, but isn't.

Sarien 13y ago

So basically he is saying that some parts that have been traditionally considered a part of UI design are not a part of UI design but of UX and that is why UX and UI are different. "Boohoo, nobody takes me seriously, they all think I just make pretty dialogs." I know that feeling but I don't think coming up with more names and vague definitions that nobody knows is going to help.

maaaats 13y ago
Taking an entire article and expressing it as "boohoo" is not a good way to have a meaningful discussion.
- TheZenPsycho 13y ago
  neither is writing an entire article that has a lot of words, and yet says nothing.
seivan 13y ago
Performance and Speed is UX. Something UI designers never really will understand. It's not just UX, but the only UX that's actually quite objective. No one ever goes "Oh gosh this app is too fast" Another non developer talking about things that they can't implement.
- TheZenPsycho 13y ago
  Condescension is not a very good technique for persuasion.
- eflowers 13y ago
  I agree. That's one of those places where being in a UX role is way outside of UI design, and I'm taking the apps on-site with customers (I am mostly b2b) and observing and testing them as they use it. Recording their responses, as well as the applications. When logging in to the system takes 40 seconds because of database performance (or lack of), that's a UX insight that needs to be observed and reported. That's not something I can control but it has a huge impact on the user's experience. There's an element of user-advocacy that I'm doing where I take the experience they are having and translate it back into business, design, and development goals as when someone is trying to use an enterprise piece of software and the experience is terrible, that is going to fall on designers, developers, PM's, and all the other people involved in the creation of the "thing" which becomes the user's experience. That's another ambiguous situation. I go spend 2 days with users out at a company HQ, and I come back with tons of data that now has to be consumed by devs, designers, pm, marketers, executives, QA, customer service etc etc. The experience of what we build is a collection of every role in the entire company as far as the user is concerned, and all those various business roles need that UX information brought back. So at this point I'm so far from UI and visual design I'm closer to a PM or product owner now, but soon will be jumping back into the design an development realm to start to fix those experience problems.. unless the problems result in bad business drivers or invalid use-cases, so then I'm back at the PM and management table, I still can't find a clear distinction about what I'm supposed to say I do. I just know that there is a certain disservice to just tell people "UI design, look and feel."

itsbits 13y ago

well written article..

whizzkid 13y ago

To the people who consider UX as a job title. If you want your online business to be successful, UX is the first thing you should think of. Design is like the strawberries on the cake, UX is, how the cake tastes.

tlarkworthy 13y ago
I have another set of people, the product designers, who will strongly disagree on your unqualified use of word "design", saying that design is the all encompassing use of a "thing" in a context. Largely being what you call UX. My larger point is that the geeks of the web, in trying to come up with pointlessly precise definitions of what they do, rebase themselves from where they came from.
- whizzkid 13y ago
  I totally agree with "trying to come up with pointlessly precise definitions of what they do" what i am trying to say is, what makes product successful is not the interface design. I don't care if your product looks so beautiful and lovely if i can not use it with bad bandwidth for example, or on my mobile. I don't care how cool colours you use, if i need to click everywhere to find what i am looking for.
  - rimantas 13y ago
    > "trying to come up with pointlessly precise definitions of what they do" A few years ago I was following a few IA (Information Architecture) blogs, but dropped them quite quickly, because that was pretty much the main concern of theirs :)
jalfresi 13y ago
For me, when some people say "design" they mean "style". For example, someone works in the UI layer? That's the visual style of the application. I think in the early days of the web, "design" was co-opted from traditional print graphic designers as a way to draw a distinction from then; a web designer. However, I think its much more important to emphasize the capital D Design that occurs in software development, as in your cake example. So I would adjust your example as such: "visual style is like the strawberries on the cake, Design is the recipe. UX is how the cake tastes i.e. the culmination of Design and attention to detail during the assembly process"

ryanbrunner 13y ago

I get that UX is not UI. I really do. The one thing that consistently confuses me is that when someone explains what UX is, it always ends up being explained in a very nebulous way where a UX designer seems to have authority over virtually everything in a company, and responsibility over very little. It can occasionally feel as though UX people want to be PMs, UI designers, marketers, developers, and data analysts all at the same time, but of course when pressed, they "aren't supposed to be about UI / PM / dev / etc.". The list is a great example. "Company Culture evangelism" is a UX discipline? Really?

martin-adams 13y ago
No, they want to work with the PMs, UI designers, marketers, developers, and data analysts, enabling them to have the right tools to make better choices.
- untog 13y ago
  But "work with" as a very euphemistic term. Are they instructing the PMs etc., or are they acting on their orders? I know that in an ideal world it's 50/50, but I don't think a position that is involved in every single step of the project has any chance of success unless you happen to also be in charge.
  - derefr 13y ago
    > Are they instructing the PMs etc., or are they acting on their orders? What does a consultant do? A UX designer is basically another name for a consultant who, by training, knows a lot of stuff about the experience your users will have with your product. Like with any consultant, the relationship can be anywhere from asking them direct questions, to getting them to make you mock-ups, to modifying your product, to having them tell you what to do. As with any other consultant, you hire them for their perspective and experience, not for some particular skill. A UX guy is not necessarily good at creating pretty designs--although he'll be able to tell you, using user-testing et al, whether a design is pretty. And so forth, for each thing they do. It's not a collection of skills; it's an approach. (A similar question might be "what does it mean to hire a scientist?" Not skills; approach.)

joshcrowder 13y ago

Great Article. UX is the new buzzword in pretty much every sector at the moment, especially financial, my last contract was "UX Developer" I'm not even sure what it means, but from my day to day, I wrote javascript HA!

davepoon 13y ago
Heheh, so they intended to hire a front end developer, because of the new buzzword, and then they hired as a UX Developer to chase up the trend... I have seen a lot of companies doing that, they also guess a UX designer could do everything...
mcv 13y ago
I guess I should also keep an eye on UX gigs then. I'm a programmer and tended to ignore UX positions because I figured it might be a whole separate discipline. But I can do javascript just fine. (I'm not much good at graphical design, though.)

lttlrck 13y ago

Who doesn't understand the difference between Interface and Experience? Clearly using tools with virtually no interface at all can be a great experience.

johnward 13y ago
Also UI can be a huge part of UX.
- crayola 13y ago
  CLI is an interface too, though.
  - GeneralMayhem 13y ago
    Yes, and it's a UI. GUI is a strict subset of UI, as is CLI.
eflowers 13y ago
Outside of places like HN, most people don't. I am trying to think of a hacker analogy, but can't.

TheZenPsycho 13y ago

So let's take all this stuff that a UI designer does, claim that a UI designer doesn't do them and can't possibly understand them, and invent a new term, UX, to mean the thing that UI design used to mean. Okay.

derefr 13y ago
Well, no. All those people who were already doing those things are UX designers now. I think the point of the rename is mostly that "UI designer" is limited and derogatory in the perception it encourages, like "code monkey" or "web designer." Nobody just does UI, so nobody is, or was ever, just a UI designer.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  UI designer is not really a job title. Visual and interaction designers are common titles, UX designer is used in orgs who don't want to distinguish officially, though designers usually have strength in one area over the other. At least that is the way it seems to work at big companies. I'm sure smaller companies use whatever the manager thinks of.
- TheZenPsycho 13y ago
  That reminds me of the universities that I went to that tried to rename the Graphic Design departments to "Communication Design" or "Graphic Communications" or anything but the image of a lowly pixel pusher. Graphic Design has been greatly devalued by the prevalence of the adobe suite of software- it used to be about solving large organisational problems. now people just think "The way it looks" and that perception has become impossible to shake. It's a real problem. I don't think it's solved by coming up with new airy fairy words that nobody understands, and are never clearly defined. It gives the strong impression that it's not a real job. Like "social media consultant".

jamesdelaneyie 13y ago

Cool, so UX is just good old fashioned design.

jol 13y ago

Since when UI ( =User Interface) is only visual? To me it seems as UI got too narrow understanding of just visual in the wild (i.e. general population) and then people who really understand what they are doing decided to rebrand themselves as too many people saying they are related to UI where just visual design related...

madoublet 13y ago

Yes and no, IMHO. The list on the left are all tools to solve interaction problems. But, I think "UX" professionals tend to fall into the trap that this is a process needed for every problem. Sometimes, good UX is just UI/Visual design. And, that is just fine.

eflowers 13y ago

Hello, I wrote this article. I can check one thing off my bucket list - an article of mine on the front page of HN (spot 28 as I write this). Reading the stuff here in HN, I agree with almost everything said. My intent wasn't to take a hard line tone, and in retrospect after getting tons and tons of feedback, I'd write it differently, but I'll take this chance to clarify some things, both for myself and for others. It is not written in a snarky or superior voice. It wasn't a rant. If it sounded so, I apologize. It also comes off as a list of "this is what a UX job title should be", which also wasn't my intent. The simplest way to say what I was trying to convey is that if you label yourself as anything "UX whatever", it is perceived as "graphic artist for interfaces." The article often seems to convey that UX "owns" all these different things, like it's a panacea role above all others. It's not. It's not something that I can clearly define. On the little 2-column lists, the things on the left were supposed to be things that I/we "do" in the sense of what often becomes the reality of the job, not in the sense of responsibilities that should be granted to use to be accountable for. And if that large list does become the reality of the job, it's more than anyone can or should do. It was intended to be a "these are some of the things a UX person might be responsible for." And yes there are some silly ones on there. I don't think UX is in a position of being a land-grab of everything that isn't writing code because "it's what we do", but it's more of a "this is what we are often doing" list. And some of the things on it should be owned by other discrete jobs careers. The motivation to write the article came from being in role after role where that list on the left was the list of things I was inadvertently responsible for, but "graphic designer for interfaces" is all that is seen by others, which isn't fair to UX people who don't focus on interface design, and isn't fair to interface designers who don't focus on the UX work that isn't based on UI or visuals or interaction. It's sort of just a response to the introductory conversation I have the first few weeks at any job. "What is your role here?" "Well I'm the new UX guy." "Great! Our stuff is ugly, you're gonna give it that sexy look and feel?" "Yes, but I am going to be doing other things that sort of result in that look and feel you want" And then when I list off some of those things, typically the other person looks at me like I'm a lunatic and we both end up confused on what I'm actually supposed to be doing, and the disappointment that I'm not just there for look and feel. But for sure, the article is not meant to be a land-grab or king of the hill situation of "UX OWNS EVERYTHING", but just a glimpse into the terrible ambiguity of what UX is and how the very common initial perception of "graphic designer for interfaces" makes it even more unclear.